MPs may receive £150 a day for turning up at the Commons

Senior MPs drawing up reforms of Parliamentary expenses are said to favour the system that would have an upper ceiling of about £24,000 a year.

There would be no need to submit receipts for costs incurred while staying in London. It is not known if the allowance would be taxable.

Nap time: Boris Johnson enjoying a snooze last year. But would more MPs simply show up and sleep if they were paid by the day?

The option is thought to be preferred to simply increasing MPs’ pay by around £40,000 a year before tax in exchange for scrapping the so-called additional costs allowance, paid to fund their second properties, which has come under widespread attack for being too easy to abuse.

But both alternatives would prove controversial because MPs would be spared from the scrutiny that comes with having to submit receipts.

A third possibility expected to be put forward by the review, headed by Commons Speaker Michael Martin, is to keep the additional costs allowance but subject it to a more rigorous audit.

Minutes of a recent meeting of Mr Martin’s committee suggest a per diem – daily – allowance is emerging as the preferred option.

‘A per diem would require only proof that the claimant was an MP and that he or she had attended the House on the day concerned,’ the minutes say.

The tax treatment would depend on the authorities being satisfied that an allowance paid to MPs for staying away from home ‘had some validation, otherwise it would be treated as pay’.

The minutes say a further option would be to pay a ‘regular monthly grant for housing costs’.

At present, MPs can claim up to £23,000 a year to run a second residence on top of their £61,820 salary.

A simple £40,000 pay rise would be worth about £24,000 after tax – approximately matching the maximum claim under the additional costs allowance.

But the typical MP would be £4,500 a year better off as the average claim under the present system is only £19,500.

Mr Martin’s Members’ Estimate Committee, which set up the review following the scandal over MP Derek Conway’s overpayment of his son out of his Parliamentary staffing allowance, is expected to unveil its recommendations this week.

It is considering changes to the staffing allowance and travel costs. A £400 a month allowance for food is almost certain to be reformed or scrapped altogether. MPs will vote on the options for reform next month.

Fresh doubts were cast yesterday over Tory chairman Caroline Spelman’s account of why she paid her former nanny with taxpayers’ money.

Tina Haynes’s father-in-law told a newspaper it was ‘ridiculous’ to suggest she was a secretary.

Mrs Spelman is facing an inquiry after she admitted paying Mrs Haynes from publicly-funded expenses ten years ago, but insists she did nothing wrong as the money was for secretarial work.

Mrs Haynes, 39, has said her duties did include ‘providing secretarial help’.

But her father-in-law John Haynes, 79, said: ‘She has no idea how to be a secretary or do secretarial work. She has only ever worked as a nanny since I’ve known her. That’s all she knows.’